Our email marketing software has been designed for both beginners and experts.
We do this by providing a simple interface to create your email marketing campaigns, manage your subscribers and track the performance of your email marketing.
Once you have created your first campaign you can use our email templates which are fully customizable or upload your own HTML template to use. Once you have chosen your template you can design the content of the email using our built-in WYSIWYG editor.
Our software also provides reports on open rates, click through rates, bounce rates and unsubscribe rates so you can measure how successful your campaigns are.
Email Marketing Software Top
You want to grow your business – and need email marketing software that’s easy to use, affordable, and will nurture and convert potential customers.
It should be simple, but with an overwhelming 450+ email marketing tools to choose from – and with every email marketing company’s website saying the same thing, it’s anything but simple.
To identify the best email marketing software for different businesses we surveyed 1,782 marketers ranging from small business owners to Fortune 500 CMOs, who were in the process of changing email marketing software to understand which tool they’re moving from and to – and why.
Here’s our verdict of the 10 Best Email Marketing Tools for 2022:
ActiveCampaign – best overall email marketing software
HubSpot – a good option for B2B service companies
Sendinblue – a good option for transactional email
Drip – a good option for e-commerce businesses
Omnisend – another good option for e-commerce businesses
Autopilot – a good option for advanced marketing automation
Benchmark – a good option for agencies
MailerLite – a good option for personal projects
ConvertKit – a good option for bloggers
EmailOctopus – a good option for developers
Read on to find out what our survey and testing revealed about each tool’s strengths and weaknesses across nine areas; cost, deliverability, integrations, ease-of-use, reporting, security, features, CRM, and support.
1 ActiveCampaign
Best overall email marketing software
With over 130,000 customers, ActiveCampaign was the most commonly mentioned tool that survey respondents were planning to choose for email marketing software in 2022.
ActiveCampaign have earned their reputation as a leading email marketing automation tool by focusing on building a world-class product.
ActiveCampaign’s automation builder makes building automations easy, similar to using a flowchart
It’s by far the most advanced email marketing platform in our list, with machine learning and predictive tools enabling marketers to work smarter and deliver higher ROI.
Often credited for pioneering visual marketing automation, ActiveCampaign is impressively intuitive and easy-to-use compared to some of the tools on our list.
ActiveCampaign’s intuitive drag-and-drop email marketing designer
And while the tip of the iceberg that you see with ActiveCampaign is category-leading, so is what’s below the surface. Their deliverability rates are exceptional (>99%), they integrate with 870+ third-party tools, and go far above and beyond with their security and compliance measures.
ActiveCampaign offers 870+ integrations including native integrations with Salesforce, Shopify, Google Sheets, Slack & more.
As an all-in-one sales and marketing tool, ActiveCampaign comes with an in-built CRM system to manage yours sales, live chat, and of course email marketing automation in one place.
A built-in sales CRM makes it easier to manage deals, but also connects to ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation engine
You’d be forgiven for thinking all of this might come at a hefty cost. Yet, starting at $9/mo, ActiveCampaign is reasonably priced and more affordable than many of the tools in this list.
ActiveCampaign recently published their Customer Success Commitment, which outlines 22 guarantees from their support team including free implementation and migration.
ActiveCampaign’s notable features:
125+ Email templates
500+ Automation recipes
870+ Integrations
Send SMS, site messages & email
Landing pages
CRM
Split actions and A/B Testing
Goal tracking, attribution & sales analytics
Predictive content, sending & deal win probability
ActiveCampaign offers a free 14-day trial with no credit card required.
Try ActiveCampaign today.
2 HubSpot
A good option for B2B service businesses
HubSpot is world-class in offering businesses an all-in-one sales and marketing platform that includes a CRM, landing pages, email marketing, marketing automation, chat, forms, and everything in between.
While some argue that trying to do everything is HubSpot’s downfall, it does enable them to do one thing exceptionally well; Reporting.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
– John Wanamaker
By using HubSpot as the backbone of your marketing and sales, you can more easily attribute revenue back to the marketing campaign, newsletter, or blog post that influenced each sale. In this sense, HubSpot is more of a CRM that offers email marketing and automation, rather than vice versa.
And if your website is built on WordPress, then you get an extra advantage to using HubSpot as your email marketing tool. HubSpot has a WordPress plugin that gives you the ability to send email campaigns directly from WordPress. The plugin also lets you use a HubSpot form or chat widget to automatically capture contacts in your CRM, all without leaving WordPress.
Hubspot can come at a cost
While much-loved, HubSpot is the second most likely response (behind Mailchimp) to “Which email marketing software are you leaving?” in our survey of 1,700+ email marketers. The reason is almost always the same; Price.
HubSpot position themselves as an affordable option for small businesses by offering free versions of their products – but don’t be fooled by the HubSpot gateway-drug. Their platform becomes exponentially expensive as your list or feature requirements grow.
One business owner I spoke with started on a $50/month plan, and within a year needed a $2,000/month plan that had to be paid annually. The only difference was an extra 15,000 contacts and adding marketing automation, yet they jumped from seeing $50 leave the bank to $24,000.
This is where I feel conflicted about HubSpot.
On the one hand, you could get the same functionality for one-tenth of the price using ActiveCampaign, Benchmark, or half of the tools in this guide. On the other hand, if the value of knowing what influenced each sale is a problem worth paying a five-figure sum to solve, then HubSpot is a strong contender.
This is why we suggest that HubSpot is an ideal choice for B2B service companies, where the value of winning a handful of extra clients a year would easily cover the cost of HubSpot. This extends to larger, or more sophisticated, agencies that must provide clients with in-depth reports on their marketing funnel.
If you just need email marketing software, HubSpot is possibly overkill. But if your search for email marketing software is part of a wider plan to raise to your marketing game and improve performance across your entire sales and marketing funnel, HubSpot is a strong contender – but don’t expect it to come cheap.
3 Sendinblue
A good option for transactional email
Sendinblue is best-known as one of the leading transactional email services. Building on this reputation they built an email marketing automation product.
We use Sendinblue to send transactional emails for two of our ventures (Leadformly and Serene), as they’re one of the few email marketing providers with servers in the European Union (which helps with our GDPR compliance) and they have good deliverability rates (we’re currently at 98%).
While I can’t comment on their marketing automation features from first-hand experience, it’s evident from our customer surveys that it’s good, but lacks some of the more advanced features (such as goal tracking, native integrations, and annotations).
If you need an email marketing tool with a solid API to get your emails into inboxes with a good deliverability rate, Sendinblue’s pre-built developer recipes make it an excellent choice.
What are Sendinblue’s key features?
Marketing automation
SMS
Live chat
CRM
Transactional email
Landing pages
Sign-up forms
Facebook Ads
4 Drip
A good option for smaller e-commerce stores
I think it’s fair to say that Drip’s focus is on smaller to medium-sized e-commerce businesses, whereas our next email marketing tool (Omnisend) seems better suited to the larger e-commerce stores.
As you’d expect, Drip integrates deeply with all mainstream e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce – as well as the more obscure and custom-made ones.
With built-in revenue analytics and tools to engage customers across multiple channels (from social channels to SMS) Drip is ideally positioned as a powerful tool for growing e-commerce stores.
Their pricing is also palatable, starting at $19/month for small list sizes.
What are Drip’s key features?
Visual automation
Email and SMS marketing
Dynamic e-commerce content blocks
Discount codes
e-commerce Segmentation
Retargeting
e-commerce store integrations
Reporting dashboards
Split testing sequences
5 Omnisend
A good option for medium-large e-commerce brands
Omnisend is quickly becoming one of the leading marketing platforms for e-commerce stores.
Designed to help e-commerce brands control their marketing across multiple channels, Omnisend offers automated email, SMS, push notifications, and most impressively, integrations with Google Ads, Instagram, Facebook Ads, Messenger, and WhatsApp – which they claim have 10X higher click-through rates than email.
Omnisend automation
By focusing purely on e-commerce, Omnisend has built innovative email templates designed to reduce cart abandonment and drive repeat buyers. From ‘wheel of fortune’ offers to virtual scratch cards and birthday discounts, it’s evident that Omnisend’s built by a team intimately aware of what works in e-commerce.
Omnisend campaign templates
As you’d expect of an e-commerce email marketing tool, Omnisend hooks into most e-commerce platforms, including Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce. Where Omnisend goes one step further is in integrating with review, loyalty and help desk platforms, such as Yotpo, Smile.io, and ReCharge.
This not only enables Omnisend to report on how your campaigns impact sales, but enables you to trigger email, SMS and social campaigns based around your customer behaviour to reduce cart abandonment, increase return buyers, drive more product reviews, and more.
Omnisend reporting
If you want the features that make Omnisend stand out, you’ll need a PRO account which starts at $199/month for up to 10,000 contacts. While not the cheapest, nor the easiest to use, Omnisend is a good option for e-commerce brands that want one multi-channel platform to rule them all.
What are Omnisend’s key features?
Visual email builder
Email, SMS and Push notifications
Transactional and marketing emails
Dynamic discount codes
e-commerce Segmentation
Retargeting
Surveys and Polls
Reporting
Popups and forms – wheel of fortune, scratch cards etc.
A/B Testing
6 Autopilot
A good option for marketing automation
Gone are the days where email marketing is about sending bulk newsletters.
In today’s digital landscape, it’s essential for email marketing to be smart; sending the right messages to the right leads at the right time, automatically.
That’s why all of our top ten email marketing providers provide marketing automation. As the name would suggest, this is Autopilot’s forte. To boot, they have one of the best-designed canvases for building email automation sequences.
Autopilot’s marketing automation annotations
Anyone who has ever built an email automation sequence knows how quickly they can become confusing. Autopilot solves this in a rather quirky way, allowing you to annotate your automation sequences with emojis, stickers and explanations, making it easy for teams to collaborate on building sequences.
Yes, it can get messy – but I’d rather that and be able to understand what’s going on, than having beautiful automation sequences that take half an hour to interpret.
Another feature I love about Autopilot is its ability to trigger actions in your other tools inside Autopilot. This saves having to configure integrations using a tool like Zapier and makes your sequences much easier to understand.
Autopilot third party integrations
Autopilot’s reporting is also excellent, though, I’ll go into this in more detail in our section on reporting and analytics below.
Starting at $49/month for 2,000 contacts, Autopilot is far from the cheapest option, particularly considering that Autopilot does not offer an in-built CRM. However, Autopilot is extremely intuitive and great for teams that need to collaborate on powerful email automation sequences. If we had to move from ActiveCampaign, this is likely where we’d go.
7 Benchmark
A good option for agencies
Benchmark is an interesting option for any business looking for a well-designed and easy-to-use email marketing tool.
While not quite as well known as other tools in the top ten, they’ve become an increasingly popular response to “Which tool are you moving to?” in our survey.
Benchmark do everything pretty well and are reasonably priced, but there’s one thing that really sets them apart from other email marketing tools – and that’s design.
Everything from their templates to the platform itself is beautifully-designed – and not just visually attractive, but great user experience. While that may seem trivial to some, it makes all the difference when it comes to understanding your data and creating the right impression with contacts.
Benchmark is a good choice for any small business that needs simple, easy-to-use email marketing and automation software. It’s likely to be a particularly good choice for small agencies and consultancies where design is important both from a staff training perspective – and also providing a good experience for clients.
What are Benchmark’s key features?
Visual email builder
Marketing automation
1,500+ Integrations
Landing pages
Surveys and Polls
Reporting
Sign-up forms
A/B Testing
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8 ConvertKit
A good option for bloggers
ConvertKit is a relatively simple email marketing tool used almost exclusively by bloggers and online course instructors to develop their personal brands.
Their platform has no bells or whistles. It doesn’t even have email templates, as ConvertKit encourages its users to send plain-text emails to increase engagement. As most of its users are individuals trying to build a personal brand this makes sense, but it does make ConvertKit a poor-fit for other use cases.
If you’re a creator that just needs a simple tool to serve your audience with regular content, there’s no better tool.
ConvertKit’s editor
9 MailerLite
A good option for personal projects
At the opposite end of the price spectrum, we have MailerLite, which is among the best email marketing tools for value for money (it’s free for sending up to 12,000 emails/month to less than 1,000 contacts).
Unlike the other beginner email marketing tools out there, MailerLite is a universally good tool irrespective of industry. Whether you’re growing a small charity, a side-hustle, or are a freelancer starting out, MailerLite offers everything you need to send bulk email marketing campaigns.
Mailerlite newsletter campaign builder
If you’re a small business, I’d suggest that a tool like ActiveCampaign may be a better fit, as they offer an in-built CRM and more advanced marketing features for roughly the same price.
For beginners and personal projects, where you just need to send beautiful email campaigns to engage your audience, MailerLite is ideal.
If you want to give MailerLite a spin, the folks there have kindly offered Venture Harbour readers an extended 30-day trial (instead of 14 days) via this link.
10 EmailOctopus
A good option for developers
There’s long been a notion in email marketing that the most affordable way to send emails is using Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES). Yet, the UI just isn’t built for marketing teams to create campaigns.
Many email marketing services have tried to bridge this gap – from Sendy to Moonmail, but they’ve often ended up either falling short on features or gravitating towards being more developer-centric.
EmailOctopus have nailed this balance.
The benefits of Amazon SES, without the drawbacks
Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES) is unbeatable from a cost perspective, and the deliverability is world-class. But it creates a huge bottleneck if used to send your marketing campaigns.
Every campaign, typo fix, and email sequence must be briefed as a development task, diverting scarce design and development resources to something that, frankly, is a flagrant waste of developer time.
EmailOctopus closes this gap. Built on the back of Amazon SES, EmailOctopus gives you the infrastructure benefits of AWS, while enabling you to build your email campaigns in a friendly UI.
The main downside of EmailOctopus is its simplicity. If you’re just sending email campaigns to a list that’s fine, but don’t expect the multi-touch attribution or visual automation builder that you’d find in a tool like ActiveCampaign.
EmailOctopus would be perfect for a small tech startup, where someone on the team is fluent in AWS and needs the flexibility and power of SES without the creation of the emails themselves needing to be coded.
Having covered the pros and cons of our top ten email marketing tools, we’ll now compare them head-to-head in nine areas that define a great email marketing tool.
best free email marketing software
Looking for a way to run your email marketing efforts without breaking the bank? The free email marketing services on this list all let you send thousands of emails per month without spending a single penny.
👉 For beginners; you can check our article what is email marketing? to find out how to get started.
Keep reading for a detailed look at each free email marketing service’s sending limits and pros and cons. Then, we’ll share our recommendations at the end. These are much better than Gmail for professional users!
Best free email marketing services in a nutshell
Here are the top solutions that we’re going to cover:
Sendinblue (www.sendinblue.com)
Mailchimp (mailchimp.com)
MailerLite (www.mailerlite.com)
Benchmark (www.benchmarkemail.com)
Omnisend (www.omnisend.com)
Sender (www.sender.net)
Before we dig in, here’s a quick summary of the free email marketing tools that we’ll cover, along with the various limits on each service’s free plan:
SERVICE SUBSCRIBER LIMIT MONTHLY EMAIL SENDS DAILY EMAIL SENDS
Sendinblue Unlimited 9,000 300
Mailchimp 2,000 10,000 2,000
MailerLite 1,000 12,000 –
Benchmark Unlimited 250 –
Omnisend Unlimited 500 –
Sender 2,500 15,000 –
Note; while there are other popular email marketing solutions on the market as well, like ConvertKit, GetResponse, Mailjet, AWeber, Constant Contact, Moosend, HubSpot, SendPulse, ActiveCampaign, and more, we felt that their free offerings were either not up to par with the lineup that we settled on in the end (or nonexistent at all). Keep reading for a deeper look at each service that has made the final list.
Email marketing on a budget? Here are the 6 best #free #email #marketing services
CLICK TO TWEET
- Sendinblue (www.sendinblue.com)
sendinblue
Sendinblue has a great free plan (unlimited contacts) along with support for SMS text message sending, SMTP, in-depth analytics, powerful marketing automation features all in the same dashboard. Sendinblue is also headquartered in France, so you’re guaranteed to comply with GDPR.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free plan lets you have an unlimited number of contacts, but you’re limited to 300 emails per day. For that reason, this platform might not be a great option if you want to send out email blasts to all your subscribers at the same time. However, if you have lots of drip campaigns, it’s quite flexible because there’s no subscriber cap.
The first upgrade is called the Lite plan, which offers 20,000 emails per month at $25.00 per month. The daily sending limit is removed.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing services?
A strong drag-and-drop email editor.
Impressive email marketing automation with things like autoresponders, coupons in emails and abandoned cart messages.
Integrations with platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, and Intercom.
Heat mapping and A/B testing to see how your emails are doing.
SMS marketing that can be linked to your email campaigns.
A feature-rich WordPress plugin that lets you manage everything from your WordPress dashboard. Plus, you can handle your transactional emails through Sendinblue as well.
Chat feature to reach out to visitors in real time. One of the unique features with an email marketing service.
A unique CRM solution that’s integrated into the main Sendinblue package.
Who should use it?
Because of the way the free account works, Sendinblue is a great email marketing solution if you have lots of subscribers but you don’t need to message them all at the same time. If you’re only going to be sending a reasonable number of emails each day, you won’t have to pay for Sendinblue at all. It’s also a good option for WordPress users because of its official plugin and it has better analytics than many of the other free email marketing services.
We are using Sendinblue at Themeisle. Because of this relationship that we have with them, they’ve offered an exclusive 30% discount for the first month on all paid plans. If you end up buying any of them, communicate with this email to redeem the discount: axel+codeinwp [at] sendinblue.com. 🔥
- Mailchimp (mailchimp.com)
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a favourite of many bloggers and small businesses because it was one of the first big email services to offer a completely free plan. Not only that, but Mailchimp has some excellent eCommerce and email marketing tools.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free plan includes 10,000 emails per month for up to 2,000 subscribers.
If you would like to upgrade to unlimited emails it costs $11.00 per month – the catch is that you can only have up to 500 subscribers – which isn’t the case for some alternatives.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing services?
The drag-and-drop editor, along with the beautiful templates that you can personalize, are some of the best in the business.
You get a landing page builder – use them to promote special offers.
Mailchimp has tools for Instagram and Facebook ads and posts.
Connect with tools like Shopify, Eventbrite, and Salesforce.
The automation tools include options for abandoned carts, welcome campaigns, and product recommendations.
A/B testing and segmentation make your emails more effective.
Great award-winning customer support available 24/7.
Options for list segmentation.
Who should use it?
We like Mailchimp for any small business owners and bloggers who appreciate great designs and stellar deliverability (it will also help you optimize your open rates). It’s also nice if you have an eCommerce store or plan on automating emails and you’d like to make your automation workflows more efficient.
- MailerLite (www.mailerlite.com)
MailerLite
MailerLite is one of the best free email marketing services that gained popularity in the last two years. This tool makes it easier for users to improve interaction using pop-ups and surveys.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free plan will let you send up to 1,000 emails without having to spend a dime. And while the free version will give you access to nearly all of the essential email marketing features, you might have to miss out on some advanced features.
By that, I mean you won’t get access to customizable templates, get live chat support or check CTR using a heatmap, or perform A/B testing. You can unlock all this for $10.00 per month. If you want to increase the subscribers limit to 2,500 then you need to spend $15 per month instead.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing software?
You can create beautiful email newsletters, pop-ups, and surveys.
Easily design a mobile-optimized email template for free.
Send a newsletter to your global subscribers at optimum time using delivery-by-time-zone.
You’d be able to control your backend using the custom HTML editor.
Find the most converting landing page using A/B split testing and heatmap analysis.
The dedicated support team for providing high-class live chat experience (premium plan)
Get access to 49+ newsletter templates for blog, eCommerce, business, and more.
Has an API for developers built on HTTP and REST.
Who should use it?
MailerLite can be used for creating landing pages (for webinars, for example), pop-ups, and surveys from a single dashboard. All this plus the heatmap testing makes it ideal for startups, small to mid-sized businesses and eCommerce stores who need good deliverability.
- Benchmark (www.benchmarkemail.com)
Benchmark
Benchmark boasts a speedy email designer made just for busy marketers. You can edit photos right in the editor and the templates are great for a wide variety of businesses. At the same time, their free email marketing tool is easy enough to use that your people will be able to subscribe/unsubscribe without added hurdles.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free plan lets you have unlimited subscribers and send up to 250 emails per month, which is almost exactly what you get with Mailchimp.
If you’d like to upgrade, you can start with 600 subscribers and unlimited email sends per month for $13.99.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing services?
It doesn’t take much time to craft email marketing campaigns using their drag-and-drop email builder.
You can easily custom code your emails.
The email automation options include welcome emails, abandoned carts, and follow-ups.
Polls and surveys are included.
You receive tools for A/B testing and integrating with hundreds of apps.
Who should use it?
Since the free plan is one of the best on the market, I would recommend this platform to those who can’t afford to pay anything for an email marketing tool. Otherwise, it works well for bloggers and eCommerce stores (running on WooCommerce and other tools).
- Omnisend (www.omnisend.com)
Omnisend
Omnisend is a must among these email service providers for users who are running online stores only. It quickly pulls products from your store and generates beautiful and fun emails and opt-in forms to grow your email list.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free email marketing plan offers you 500 emails per month, and you can reach 250 of your subscribers. It is possible to have a larger contact list but you will only be able to send to 250 of your contacts.
Upgrading depends on whether you need more emails per month or more advanced features. The pricing plans start at $16 per month for 500 subscribers and 6,000 emails. The email count and pricing goes up with more subscribers.
👉 If you’re interested in any of those paid plans, you can get a limited time discount of 20% – for Themeisle readers only. The discount is valid for six months on the Standard plan. Click here and redeem the coupon code INFLUENCES206 during checkout.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing software?
The free plan is a steal and the upgrades are rather flexible.
The eCommerce integrations instantly pull products you want to sell into the email.
It has creative signup forms like popups, landing pages, and a wheel-of-fortune game.
Send out discount codes or scratch cards.
Create automation reports and A/B test campaigns.
Retain mobile audience using mobile-friendly email templates.
Send out automated emails for abandoned carts and order confirmations.
Also offers enterprise solutions for bigger companies.
Who should use it?
Omnisend is a great free option for eCommerce stores. You can still use this free email marketing software if you’re not running a store, but you’ll miss out on a lot of the unique functionality.
- Sender (www.sender.net)
Sender
Sender is yet another email service with a wonderful free plan. It also offers push notifications to go along with its segmentation, integrations, and stunning designs that you can customize.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free plan lets you have up to 2,500 subscribers and send 15,000 emails per month.
The next upgrade is $10 per month for 5,000 subscribers and 60,000 emails per month.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing services?
It has plugins for most popular content management systems.
Video gets converted into animated GIFs inside emails.
The analysis tools include click maps and Google Analytics – so you can track all your metrics effectively and in an user-friendly way.
Adding eCommerce products is done by quickly copying and pasting links.
It can help you automate your social media marketing efforts.
It will also give you pointers on optimization of your subject lines.
Who should use it?
Sender has some wonderful tools, but I like it best because the pricing remains fairly low as you upgrade.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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